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Katha:
I think it is a good question, but your answer places too muc weight on "cognitive variables" (i.e. ideology) while tending to ignore th eimportance of organizational resources. The strength of religion lies not in the power of their ideas, which most people on this list would agree are pure superstition. Its strnegth lies in its organizational resources, in th efact that there are organized communities that can mobilise people for action - be it fundraising, voting, protest or letter writing.
The Left does not have that power. That is, of course, not intended to ignore organizations like Jobs with Justice, National Lawyer's Guild, or ACORN that actually mobilise different groups of people for collective action instead of letting them feel good about themsleves by making charitable donations to worthy causes. What I mean is that the Left has much fewer organizational resources than organised religion.
That can be easily demonstrated by the example of Baltimore's Black churches to force both the mayor and MD Governor Glendening to sign an executive order prohibiting diplacement of employees by workfare recipinets (I think The Nation run a piece on that some time ago). This was accomplished by sheer power of religious organizing with the conspicuous absence of any recognizable Left groups - including the Labor Party that should have been on the forefront of this. New England or New York might be different, but I suspect the situation I described is rather typical of anything south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Unfortunately, I think that any alliance between Black churches (the main organizing force for the working class today) and the Left does not have any promising prospects, because the reverends are generally a reactionary force, Black bourgeoisie if you will, that may strike a deal with elite liberals (cf. Civil Rights Movement) or even conservatives, but they are very unlikely to align themseleves with any movement striving to overhaul the status quo. The reverends have simply too much too lose - they will be the loyal supporters of the Democract Party, and that is why Democrats take them for granted.
The same might be said of union bureaucracy.
So the bottom line is that the Left should put the ideological issues on the back burner, at least for the time being, and start building its organizational base - i.e. the base capable of mobilising people and resources. By that I mean 'old-style' union organizing, people holding regular meetings, events, outings, festivities, union stewards visiting people in their homes, helping them solve various life problems - in a word, Left organizing being an integral part of every day life, a "civil religion' if you will. Please note that the sky pilots do it all the time - hence their political clout. Working with existing religious organizations might be an advantage, especially in terms of recruitment, but we must not forget that any such allinace has limits imposed by the class interests of the clergy.
Regards,
Wojtek Sokolowski
(Remember when
>"the left" placed its hopes in expanding the electorate through voter
>registration? Remember the year of the Woman, and the radical idea that
>one could win elections by appealing to women's needs and interests
>rather than by taking their votes for granted? that's all over.) Just as
>Richard Rorty imagines that the rudeness of the student left sent the
>working class into the arms of Nixon, when in fact, Nixon was paying
>construction workers to beat demonstrators up, the Michael Moore-Michael
>Kazin left-bashing imagines that if leftists had been more respectful of
>the lifestyle of the Reagan Democrats, and had moderated their own
>political demands (abortion,gay rights) the white working class would
>not vote for Republicans.
>
> But what do other people think?
>
> katha
>
>